peasants? How could she be practical?
‘You know,’ she said to Carmen, ‘it dawned on me a couple of days ago that anthropologists have to be like poets, and need to be accurate as well as compassionate about the people they describe.’
‘I like that … give me an example.’
‘What about Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Mirror’ – the first few lines tell us how we should proceed in the field.’
‘What does she say?’
‘Essentially she recommends we should be truthful and have no preconceptions about what we observe and record – don’t let love or dislike cloud your observations.
‘Yes, being truthful is important,’ said Carmen. ‘Louise, you are the only person who thinks that poets can contribute to scientific enquiry! Where do you get all these ideas from and what makes you so fearless?’
Early Life – South Australia
AFTER LOUISE DAVITT was born in 1962, her mother Monica sang lullabies as she rocked her infant daughter. Family members said the child inherited her mother’s temperament – gentleness, blended with steel. Louise’s father Gerald sang Mozart’s ‘Cradle Song: Sleep my Princess Oh Sleep’, and his daughter’s eyes would shine. As she grew older, he was impressed by her capacity to make decisions with calm, intelligent deliberation.
Louise and her older brothers, Geoff and Alex, spent school holidays on their paternal grandparents’ barley and sheep grazing property near Crystal Brook in South Australia’s mid-north. The children loved the creeks and birds and the ancient gnarled eucalypts. After winter rains the land was green, but in summer it baked to brown and yellow. Their grandparents had worked hard all their lives, solely to make ends meet; they never expected to be rich, and taught their son and grandchildren that hardship was a great leveller. Louise’s grandmother Margaret was a lifelong member of a local book club, while her grandfather Max supported the local football. They played tennis on their homemade tarmac court and regularly entertained friends in their battered hundred-year-old farmhouse. Often life was challenging but troubles never struck root for Louise’s grandmother.
Drought, low incomes, Margaret’s miscarriages and a stillbirth had affected the grandparents’ lives, yet Margaret Davitt could appraise and put into perspective the truth of what happened. In any situation, she was the family’s sounding board, observing events and asking, ‘Is this event good, bad or of no consequence? And where could it lead? And what effect would it have on the grandchildren, now and later?’
Margaret liked to play games of questions and answers. ‘I learn from listening to the stillness in life,’ she would say, ‘and then I enquire.’ Louise loved talking with her grandmother. She remembered how Margaret had once told her that she owed her health and resilience to the salubrity of fresh winter winds and summer’s hot breezes that prevailed in Crystal Brook.
‘Fortitude in the face of adversity, that’s your grandmother,’ her father often said. Louise knew how her grandmother’s ideals were distilled in memorable phrases:
Nothing to fear in life.
Hardship can be endured.
Everyone has talent.
True love is everlasting.
Her grandmother’s motto was to enjoy life and be happy in the moment. ‘Laugh much, and when you experience difficulty, pause, and think carefully before you make a decision.’ She told Louise that life’s journey was rarely straightforward, and she recognised that Louise was keen to travel and meet different people.
Louise’s father, ever tethered to practical matters, was no romantic. He too advised her how important it was to be able to adapt to setbacks, which were part of life’s merry-go-round.
On her grandparents’ farm, Louise ran through tall barley, walked for miles, gathered blackberries and native peaches called quandongs, fished for tiddlers in creeks, watched small trout twist and dive in the farm dam, climbed trees, built dens and learnt how summer’s burnt landscape would always recover by the next spring.
Since puberty, Louise’s features were admired: her broad brow, fine nose and full lips; her expressive, deep-set blue eyes; thick honeyblonde, shoulder-length hair; and her tall athletic body with long muscular legs. But she never flaunted her looks.
As a teenager with many friends, swimming and surfing at an Adelaide suburban bayside beach was a favourite pastime. They spent long days at the beach, their skin turning nut-brown. And it wasn’t long before she experienced young love. She knew the facts of life, had casual boyfriends but never slept with them, though occasionally she thought she would like to. At sixteen, her mother arranged for her to be prescribed the pill. Louise fell in love with a classmate friend, Luke, but they didn’t make love. However, with Rob Hardy things changed.
Rob was a first-year medical student whom she met while in her final year at high school. In the dunes at sunrise, below a cobalt sky, they experimented with and enjoyed their intimacy. Rob glowed in her company. They became a close couple. They sailed together across the Spencer Gulf in a friend’s racing yacht. Once they skydived above Strathalbyn: a gift from Louise to Rob on his birthday. Her family wondered if Rob and Louise would ever part. Her mother, observing them, said, ‘I think they’ll always be together.’ The two teased each other openly.
‘Your hair’s like a spiky echidna,’ she told him one evening at a family dinner after they had spent an afternoon at the beach. Rob laughed, and joked that this was the price he had to pay for spending so much time with Louise at the beach.
Alone together on an early summer evening, nestled in their dune resting-place, Louise stepped out of her shorts, knickers and t-shirt and raced Rob into the surf. Initially uncertain, Rob threw off his clothes and together they plunged into the lapping waves. Rob was excited at her desire. He held her by her waist; they kissed with salty lips and clung to each other. Louise arched back against him and Rob felt himself pushing into her amid the breaking waves.
Slowly they parted and swam out to deeper water, kissed again and held each other’s hands as they floated on the rolling waves, and waited for the waning of the day.
‘We’ll be like this forever,’ Rob whispered in her ear.
‘Yes, I know we will. If ever I go away,’ Louise said with a distant look, ‘I will always think of you, I promise you that.’
About to complete her first degree, Louise sat at her desk in a brightly decorated study-bedroom as a late-spring drizzle glazed her windows. The conclusion of this preparatory stage of her career was in sight. Focused, she had adopted her father’s adage: ‘Fortune favours the prepared mind’. Passion blended with intellect, her ideas gathered momentum. University staff and fieldwork supervisors were struck by the rousing quality of her seminar presentations and essays. Characteristically, she wrote, People die in their houses and in the bush amid cocoons of silence …
After four years she graduated with first-class honours in anthropology. The next step was to enrol for postgraduate studies in the joint schools of African Studies and Tropical Medicine in London, learn some Amharic and begin fieldwork studies in Ethiopia. ‘So here I am ready to leave,’ she murmured.
